One important question -- have you done your market research?

I know --market research, how boring!

But before you tune out and disregard question, think about what it will take to start your online business. You're going to be investing lots of energy and time as well as money. Don't you want to make sure your product or service has potential?

You bet you do! If you don't, all your efforts and money could be wasted and your business may become another online casualty. It happens all time.

So, before you get too anxious, consider following:

Is there a market for your idea? Don't assume that just because you, your family and friends love your idea, it's going to be a profitable one. There's a big world out there and what you consider a great idea may not be suitable for rest of world, so let's make sure it has potential.

There are 4 things you need to consider:

- What is online demand? - Who's your Competition? - What kind of profit can you make?

Online Demand

The simplest way to find out if your product or service has potential is to simply find out what online supply and demand is.

This is done by taking supply or number of competing sites for a product or service and dividing it by demand or how much product or service is searched for. The lower result, better.

For example, let's say you want to sell 'porcelain dolls' but you're also considering selling charm bracelets. Let's see what better choice might be by looking at supply and demand.

My search engine of choice is Google so when I type in 'porcelain dolls' into Google it returned 3,630,000 competing sites as of this writing.

My keyword search tool of choice is Overture, so when I type 'porcelain dolls' into overture search term tool results are 17946.

First let's define our terms.

Bandwidth vs. Latency:

Bandwidth & Throughput Digital bandwidth or throughput is a measurement of amount of data that can be transferred over a digital line over a specific amount of time.

Latency Latency is time it takes to deliver a packet of data from one place to another. This includes time it takes for an electrical or optical signal to travel a certain physical distance (propagation delay) and time it takes to process these signals along way (processing delay).

So bandwidth is a measure of frequency or a rate of service delivery while latency is a measure of time or signal delay.

Technology Comparision.

Cable service uses signals transmitted through same coax cable that cable television uses. DSL uses normal phone lines to send digital signals to a DSL modem.

Coaxial cable has a far greater capacity than RJ-11 phone cable. But, coaxial cable coming into your home is shared with many people outside your house and provides many services. Cable modems have higher bandwidth though connection is shared among cable users in your service area and even with your digital cable box. As a result performance is quite similar to DSL. Generally, cable modems can achieve better peak throughput, but this high bandwidth is not consistant and depends, again, on load, affected by time of day and other factors. DSL service usually provides a more constant, consistant feed, with lower latency. The distance to your exchange or "switch" is main factor that determines DSL quality of service. Look for green (in Toronto) phone exchange box in your neighbourhood and note how far your home is from that box.